YouTube vs. HBO. Round One. Fight!

HBO filed a copyright complaint and sent it to YouTube, sustaining the clips showing the fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. and posted on YouTube are infringing their rights. It seems that YouTube published two versions of the fight, both of them representing TV rips. One clip was offering quite a poor quality and recorded thousands of views while the other one is improved but with fewer views. However, both clips were removed at about 4 p.m. on Monday and replaced with the well know "The video is no longer available due to a copyright claim" message.

"We take our copyright issues very seriously. We consider it extremely valuable programming, and we reacted quickly when we saw that it was available," Ray Stallone, spokesman for HBO, a division of Time Warner Inc., sustained according to The Sentinel.

HBO sustained that it intends to sell the content published on YouTube so the clips might affect the company's profits. As you surely know, this is not the first time when the Mountain View company is sent to the judge for the content uploaded on its page. The recently-acquired video sharing service recorded an impressive number of lawsuits, most of them filed for copyright infringement and for the videos published by its users.

It all started with Daniela Cicarelli, the ex-wife of the famous football player Ronaldo, who sued Google for publishing videos without authorization. At that time, the search giant defended itself by sustaining it removed the clips but its users uploaded them back. Then, Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, sued Google for copyright infringement, requiring $1 billion in damages. The case was quite interesting as the company first demanded Google to remove almost 100.000 clips from the page.